in bureaucratic hell
Jul. 15th, 2014 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI've just spent two and a half hours on the phone with Medicare representatives, trying to straighten out a problem with my late mother's claims. That's on top of the hour I spent yesterday on the same thing.
Am I ready to disavow my liberal faith in government and let the lean and mean private sector take over our business? Absolutely not, and here's why.
1) Most of these people were actually trying to be helpful, even if they didn't know anything, and went beyond the call of duty in trying to get me information. Especially the last one, who was in the wrong department, but who listened when I explained that hers was the only department I could reach, and who really went the extra mile by contacting the right department (unreachable by outside phone) and getting a definitive answer, and chatting agreeably as we waited.
2) These departments that I was communicating with were those of a private contractor, not the government in the strict sense. And I reached them because I was given the number by a volunteer assistance program whose representatives also took a little extra effort to help.
3) All around, it was far less frustrating than the oceans of time I spent waiting on hold and being shuttled back and forth to the same numbers that had previously been unable to help me, and being assured that something was done when it was not done, and being told I should have asked the previous person to do something they'd told me they could not do, that I had trying to set up AT&T internet service a few years ago. In this case today, when I reported that someone else could not help me, I was listened to, and something else was tried.
Winston Churchill once said (quoting an old proverb, or so he claimed) that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others. So I can say that government bureaucracies are the worst bureaucracies in the world, except for all the corporate ones.
Am I ready to disavow my liberal faith in government and let the lean and mean private sector take over our business? Absolutely not, and here's why.
1) Most of these people were actually trying to be helpful, even if they didn't know anything, and went beyond the call of duty in trying to get me information. Especially the last one, who was in the wrong department, but who listened when I explained that hers was the only department I could reach, and who really went the extra mile by contacting the right department (unreachable by outside phone) and getting a definitive answer, and chatting agreeably as we waited.
2) These departments that I was communicating with were those of a private contractor, not the government in the strict sense. And I reached them because I was given the number by a volunteer assistance program whose representatives also took a little extra effort to help.
3) All around, it was far less frustrating than the oceans of time I spent waiting on hold and being shuttled back and forth to the same numbers that had previously been unable to help me, and being assured that something was done when it was not done, and being told I should have asked the previous person to do something they'd told me they could not do, that I had trying to set up AT&T internet service a few years ago. In this case today, when I reported that someone else could not help me, I was listened to, and something else was tried.
Winston Churchill once said (quoting an old proverb, or so he claimed) that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others. So I can say that government bureaucracies are the worst bureaucracies in the world, except for all the corporate ones.
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no subject
Date: 2014-07-15 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-16 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-16 07:19 pm (UTC)I mention the pay because there are a lot of people who get curiously upset at their tax dollars going to finance government employees' private lives, but they don't seem to get upset about the overinflated prices they pay for private goods going to finance the far vaster private finances of CEOs). It can't just be because buying private goods is voluntary, because in practice it often isn't.